Tag: Facebook

Facebook To Add Support For TV-Quality Live-Streams

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook is planning to add support for studio-quality live broadcasting to its live-streaming feature to make it more appealing to content creators and publishers. Previously, Facebook’s Live Video only allowed a single smartphone or tablet to stream content. With this change, capable content creators like TV networks would be able to plug Facebook’s live-stream into their broadcast control rooms, allowing for live content that has multiple camera angles, remote segments from correspondents, and, in general, higher production value. Facebook is reportedly going to announce this new capability during its upcoming annual F8 developers conference in April.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook has attracted a number of publishers and media owners, including MLB, E! Network, and TMZ, to create live content on its platform since it rolled out the live-streaming feature in December. Now with this added support, content creators will be able to leverage their production prowess to create more polished live content. Brands should consider working with content creators to develop ads or sponsored live content to take advantage of the new tools.

 

Source: Digiday

Facebook Now Offers Brands Daily Breakdown Of Video Views

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has been steadily building out its video products to attract content creators and compete with YouTube for the huge ad spending shifting from TV to digital videos. Now, the social network has updated its video data dashboard to give brands daily breakdowns of video views, which include the three key metrics – total views, total time spent on a video, and the number of times the video was viewed for at least 10 seconds – that Facebook introduced in February to enhance its video measurement.

What Brands Need To Do
This new daily breakdown of video views can offer brands a more granular look at how their video content is performing on Facebook and better inform their digital video strategies. As Facebook continues to improve its video ad products, brand advertisers should also consider reconfiguring their digital ad mix and diversifying the video platforms they choose.

 

Source: The Next Web

 

Aflac Insurance Creates A 360 Video Ad For Facebook

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Aflac Insurance is the latest brand to try out Facebook’s 360-degree video ads. Working with VaynerMedia, the insurer cast its brand mascot the Aflac Duck as a superhero coming to the rescue of customers rescue in an animated spherical video spot, which debuted on Facebook on Tuesday. The ad marks Aflac’s first entry into 360-degree videos and will run on Facebook for six weeks. The company is supporting the new digital effort with an additional social media push on Instagram and Twitter.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook leveraged Oculus’s VR technology to bring 360-degree video support to the News Feed on the desktop web and its Android app last September, and later extending support to its iOS app in November. Around the same time, Facebook started to test 360-degree video ads with select brands, including AT&T, Samsung, and Walt Disney World. For brands wishing to engage consumers with immersive narratives, Facebook provides a good platform to promote branded 360-degree video content.

 

Source: AdAge

Header image courtesy of Aflac’s Facebook Page

Facebook Wants To Lift Brands With New Measurement API

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook introduced a Conversion Lift measurement tool in January 2015 to help brand marketers better understand which parts of their ad campaigns are driving sales. Now it has launched Lift API extending that tool so that advertisers and other third-party measurement partners can create their own studies on lift to pinpoint which ads lead to conversions. Also, Facebook is adding more fields and categories to its ad reporting to reduce confusion in attribution sometimes caused by cookies.

What Brands Need To Do
As Facebook continues to refine its measurement tools, brands can get a clearer view of their campaign performance across channels, learn which ads are working, and adjust their ad budgets accordingly. If your brand is looking for a way to get a better understanding of your Facebook ads, this new API should be worth a try.

For more information on how brands can utilize customer data to better understand shopper behavior and reach shoppers across channels, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: AdWeek

 

Publishers Are Broadcasting With Facebook’s Live Video

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following Facebook’s wide release of its live-streaming feature Live Video, some early-adopting publishers and media owners are jumping on board and creating original content for the fast-growing platform. A few weeks ago, MTV Germany became the first TV channel to air a live show on Facebook with the launch of MTV+You, a 16-part weekly talk show featuring celebrity guests talking about entertainment news, gossip, and trends. Last week, celebrity gossip site TMZ reported that its live shows on Facebook are getting between 75,000 and 100,000 live viewers. Similarly, The Daily Beast announced today that it is launching two new daily live shows on Facebook, aiming to foster a long-term relationship with readers with routine video consumption.

Market Impact
Starting with Meerkat’s breakthrough at SXSW last year, live-streaming has seen significant growth  thanks to the likes of Twitter and Facebook coming out with their own live broadcasting features. With Live Video, brands can leverage Facebook’s massive reach to acquire a new audience, and the immediacy of content and the relatively low production costs of live-streaming content make it an appealing emerging platform for brands to explore.

 

Brands Get Another Tool To Publish Instant Articles

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following last week’s announcement of a plugin that automatically generates Instant Articles pages for WordPress sites, brands are getting another tool to publish their content with Facebook’s fast-loading program. Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to mobile publishing platform Steller, allowing all users, including brands, to use Steller’s app to create and distribute content on Facebook through Instant Articles.

What Brands Need To Do
Since its debut last May, Facebook has restricted access to Instant Articles to publishers only. Now with these two new tools, brands can easily publish content in Instant Articles without piggybacking on publishers’ content. As media consumption shifts toward mobile, it is crucial for brands to start using the tools available to optimize their digital content so as to deliver a leaner, faster user experience to mobile consumers.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Instagram To Follow Facebook’s Playbook In Ad Products

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In an interview with Re/code, a spokesperson for Instagram revealed its plan to build out its ad products to make its platform more brand-friendly. Taking multiple pages out of Facebook’s playbook, the photo-sharing social network is said to be expanding its tools for marketers including profiles for businesses similar to Facebook’s Pages, additional measurement data on all posts whether they are paid or not, and the ability to buy ads via a mobile device.

What Brands Need To Do
Throughout last year, Instagram ramped up its efforts to court brand advertisers, introducing several new ad products and targeting tools that use Facebook’s data. In January, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app announced that it had hit 200,000 advertisers, which is more than Twitter has. As Instagram becomes more ad-friendly, brands that are seeing positive results from their Facebook campaigns should certainly try out what Instagram has to offer as well.

 

Source: Re/code

 

Facebook Updates Atlas Ad Network To Help Brands Track Offline Sales

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has added point-of-sale insights and other updates to its Atlas ad network to improve its ad measurement and help brands track if their digital ads are driving offline sales. One new feature called “Offline Actions” allows marketers to upload their own point-of-sale data and view it alongside their Atlas ad campaigns, while “Path to Conversion” aims to determine whether ads on desktop or mobile devices drove a digital sale. Atlas, the social network’s ad network that extends beyond Facebook’s own site and apps, will also begin offering video ads by the end of this month.

What Brands Need To Do
Similar to the offline attribution tracking tool that Foursquare introduced last month, the updated Atlas should give brand advertisers a better understanding of how their digital ads are doing, allowing them to adjust their campaigns according to how each channel is performing in terms of driving store visits and conversion rates.  

For more information on how retailers can better utilize customer data to connect with shoppers throughout every step of the purchase journey, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: AdWeek

 

Facebook Canvas

Fast Forward: Rich Media Comes To Facebook Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

  • Facebook Canvas extends the fast, clean, and frictionless Instant Article experience to mobile ads
  • Brand storytelling will be more engaging and outside the reach of ad blockers
  • Advertisers need to make sure the experience they provide matches consumers’ heightened expectations

What Is Canvas
Last Thursday, Facebook launched Canvas, an ad product that loads Facebook-hosted, full-screen rich media right from the News Feed, bringing the instant-loading, cleaner mobile experience introduced by Instant Articles to Facebook’s ad suite. The social network is also offering brands a user-friendly self-serve tool to help them build Canvas ads with no coding required, allowing brands to add interactive rich media like animations, carousels, product catalogs, tilt-to-view images, and videos to their ads with ease. Different versions of a Canvas ad can be targeted to different demographics, just like other Facebook ads.

The first advertising partners have seen much higher engagement than with other Facebook ads. ASUS, the computer and electronics manufacturer, saw 42% more clicks on their Canvas than other ads and 70% of their Canvas viewers clicked through to the ASUS website. Viewers of Lowe’s Canvas spent 28 seconds on average and the 16 million people Coke reached averaged 18 seconds.

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What Brands Need To Do
With Facebook making Instant Articles available to all users last week, users will soon be served with a lot of Instant Articles-enabled pages, familiarizing them with the fast-loading experience. This means that Facebook users will expect a similar experience when it comes to ads as well. Therefore, brands should use Canvas to create rich-media ads that tell the full creative story that otherwise would require a microsite. Here are some good examples of brands that are already trying out this new ad product.

For restaurant and QSR brands, Wendy’s test campaign serves as a good example of the rich media experience that Canvas offers. Wendy’s created an ad that deconstructed a cheeseburger and let people scroll, swipe, and see GIFs of all the different ingredients in one of its burgers. The ad received 65 seconds of average view time, and 2.9% of viewers got all the way to the bottom and used the Wendy’s restaurant locator.

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For fashion and retail brands, Canvas offers a great tool to build engaging mobile ads with a lot of beautiful images that fully showcase their products. Usually, pages with a lot of images would take a long time to load, losing impatient consumers in the process. Canvas’ fast-loading ads solve that problem without loss of fidelity or simplification in storytelling. Several brands including Mr Porter, Michael Kors, and Carrefour were brought on as launch partners to try out the new format and had successful results.

For entertainment brands, the new ad format also allows the creation of deeper narrative and engagement of viewers through video and interactive media. NBCUniversal, for example, is featured on Facebook Canvas’ launch site with an interactive ad for the Minions with videos, GIFs, and social content, ending with a buy button for the movie’s DVD.

Market Impact
Facebook started testing the immersive full-screen ad unit last September, and the company says early tests have shown users spend more time on Canvas ads with the top Canvas ads averaging over 70 seconds of view time per user. While it remains to be seen if the increases in engagement are due to the novelty of the format, the flexibility and responsiveness make us believers. As consumers avoid ads more frequently, Facebook is offering a way for advertisers to build compelling, targeted experiences with potentially broad reach and that can’t be blocked.

How We Can Help
Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss content strategies and tactics on how to engage your audience with storytelling on Facebook and elsewhere.

For previous editions of Fast Forward, please visit ipglab.com. Please reply with any constructive criticism or feedback. We want these to be as useful as possible for you and your clients, and your feedback will help us immensely.

 

All pictures featured are promotional images courtesy of the Facebook Canvas site

Facebook Tweaks News Feed To Prioritize Live Videos

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remark last week about “planning to make livestreaming a priority at Facebook,” the company has started its push for the new Live Video feature, which enables users to broadcast themselves to their friends right from the Facebook app, in real time. The social network has tweaked its News Feed ranking algorithm to give Live Video posts a higher spot in the News Feed so that more people will see those livestreams. In addition, Facebook is reportedly offering celebrities up to six figures to use Live Video, as it looks to leverage star power to drum up interest in its Periscope competitor.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook’s push for Live Video dovetails nicely with the company’s recent efforts in building out its video products and vying for video ad dollars. For brands, this presents a new channel to reach a mobile audience in real time with branded livestreams or sponsored live events. As livestreaming continues to evolve as an emerging media platform, we expect to see more brand opportunities and content formats arise.

 

Sources: Digiday & Re/Code